Analyze why Support usage is growing but revenue is flat

Problem Statement Description

Product context: DoorDash is a local commerce and delivery platform; its products include restaurant delivery, DashPass, grocery and retail delivery, merchant tools, and dasher tools.

DoorDash is seeing increased usage of its Support experience among enterprise merchants, while revenue from this segment has remained flat. These merchants may include large restaurant chains, grocery partners, or retail brands that rely on DoorDash for order fulfillment, customer reach, and operational reliability across many locations.

Your task is to investigate this as a root-cause analysis problem. Focus on understanding whether the rise in Support usage reflects real operational friction, a product or process change, a change in merchant behavior, or a measurement issue. You should also connect the support trend to revenue outcomes without assuming that support growth is automatically good or bad.

Frame the problem from the perspective of DoorDash’s marketplace: merchant satisfaction and ROI, consumer experience, Dasher reliability, support cost, and overall unit economics may all be relevant. The analysis should separate symptoms from root causes and identify what evidence would be needed before taking action.

The experience should consider:

- How to define the anomaly: support usage growth, flat revenue, time period, baseline, and expected trend

- Which enterprise merchant cohorts to segment by, such as vertical, geography, merchant size, tenure, integration type, or order volume

- What support usage means: tickets, chats, calls, self-serve help, escalations, contacts per order, or contacts per merchant

- Instrumentation checks to confirm the trend is real and not caused by tagging, routing, bot changes, policy changes, or reporting gaps

- Hypotheses across operations, product, merchant integrations, pricing, fulfillment quality, promotions, and account management

- Evidence needed to connect support drivers to revenue, retention, order frequency, merchant expansion, or lost sales

- Short-term mitigations versus longer-term prevention mechanisms

- Guardrails such as merchant experience, consumer reliability, Dasher impact, support cost, and marketplace health

The goal is to present a structured investigation plan that narrows the issue, identifies the most likely root causes, and defines how DoorDash should validate, mitigate, and prevent recurrence while protecting enterprise merchant value and marketplace economics.